Tess Awakening (44 page)

“No. He had been spirited away before we got
there.”

“Objection!” one of the Amir’s lawyers
interjected. “There is no evidence that my client harbored his son
anywhere.”

“Ms. Turner, isn’t it true that during your
invasion of my client’s house in Istanbul that your men shot one of
the guards?”

“They resisted and we had to neutralize him.
He lived. We did not kill anyone.”

“Isn’t it true that General al-Saadi’s wife
who resided in the house was killed by a gunshot to the head?”

“It is regrettable, but we didn’t do it.
Apparently, she committed suicide.”

“Ms. Turner, can you think of a reason why
the death of an innocent woman occurred in such a horrible way? Did
you harass her beyond reason?”

One of Tess’s lawyers stood up. “Objection!
There is no way to ascertain why the woman committed suicide.”

“Sustained,” said the Judge.

“Ms. Turner, isn’t it true that you returned
to Jordan, where you were still keeping my client prisoner? Did you
abuse him again? I believe that this time he received severe,
life-threatening wounds.”

“He tried to escape and hurt three of my
people. I stopped him and we had a fight. He lost.”

“Did my client disclose the information you
were seeking?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Is this because he really didn’t know?”

“Oh, he knew,” Tess responded. “He just
stonewalled us.”

Your honor, this is the end of our
questioning for now. I reserve the right to recall the
witness.”

“Granted.”

***

Lawyer conference; Jackson Davis Esquire
speaking. “Tess, if you keep testifying, you are going to get in
real trouble. Al-Saadi has covered all angles. He has plausible
deniability for just about everything he did. You, on the other
hand, are looking like a runaway freight train. I really think that
we should reach an agreement with him before it gets worse.”

“No way! He is not going to get close to my
son.” Tess meant it.

Back to the courthouse, Tess’s lawyer was now
asking the questions. “Ms. Turner, eventually you found your son.
Would you please tell us about this?”

“My son was being held at a house in
Sorrento, Italy. He was with Amir’s sister Fadime.” We managed to
take my son back and left the country.”

“No further questions, your honor.”

“Redirect,” Amir’s lawyer stepped in front of
her.

“Ms. Turner, do you have corroborating
evidence regarding what you just said?”

“Yes, my team was there and witnessed that my
son was in Fadime’s custody. She was helping her brother Amir hide
him.”

“If we summon your team to testify, will they
tell the truth?”

“Yes, they are all outstanding people.”

“Nevertheless they are your employees,
beholden to you. How credible can their testimony be in front of
the court?”

“As I said, they are all honorable people,
and they will tell the truth about what happened.”

“Ms. Turner, is it true that the Italian
police has issued a warrant for your arrest?”

“I am not the criminal here. I just took my
son back.”

“And yet there is not a shred of proof that
your son was kidnapped by my client. Also, Madame Fadime is nowhere
to be found, so we can’t have her testify. Is there evidence that
she was involved in this scheme, or is this just a
fabrication?”

“My son was taken away from me. He was hidden
away in Italy by Amir al-Saadi. I merely took him back.”

“If any of this actually happened, why didn’t
you go the Italian police?”

“Because it would have taken days to get them
to move. It wasn’t a feasible option.”

“In other words, you decided to take the law
into your hands, and you cannot prove that any of this actually
happened.”

Tess’s lawyer stood up. “Objection! Counsel
is harassing the witness.”

“Granted,” said the judge. “Time for recess;
we will meet here again Monday at 10 AM.”

Chapter 77

Amir was pleased with the court proceedings.
His expensive lawyers were worth their weight in gold. Of course,
his doctoring of the facts helped. He now looked like the aggrieved
victim and Tess had come across as a violent, abusive woman.
Perfect.

That evening, Amir dressed in casual clothes,
boarded a car and Kemal drove him to Newark to meet the five
mercenaries they had hired. In a conference room at the Hilton
hotel, he briefed the men on what he wanted them to do. It didn’t
take long to conclude that this was a group of military-trained
violent psychopaths with not even a shred of conscience. They would
do anything you asked, no matter how heinous; all you had to do is
pay them. Taken together, they were a scary bunch; precisely what
Amir wanted.

The legal custody action was just the first
stage of his plan. It was pure harassment and a good way to keep
Jake and Tess in place.

The second stage was the release on the
Internet of the videos that Fadime had made in England showing him
and Tess making love. He felt that this was his secret weapon,
particularly since he had doctored the videos to obfuscate his own
face, but not Tess’s. There was no way to tell that he was the man
in the scene. Amir regretted having to assume anonymity; in his
mind, the lovemaking session would have been a source of pride for
him — proof of his stamina, virility and amatory skills.
Unfortunately, he needed to remain morally pristine so the court
would not associate him with such distasteful behavior. He called
Kemal and told him to order his computer geeks to post the video on
the Internet. Kemal complied and Amir poured himself a cognac,
satisfied that he had initiated hell in cyberspace.

Ten minutes later Kemal called him. “General,
something went wrong. All of the Web sites that tried to show the
video are down. There seems to be a sophisticated hacking operation
at work. Somehow, they detected the video’s signature and destroyed
it.”

Amir gulped the brandy.

Joe Slezak, Jake’s favorite geek, had been
waiting for the release of the video and when he detected the
uploads to the web, released a virus that destroyed it everywhere
it was hosted. It was pure magic, something that he prided himself
doing every day.

Immediately, Jake rushed SRD operatives to
the many pornographic websites nationwide that had attempted to
broadcast the video. They barged into the offices of the
administrators with cease-and-desist orders. To reinforce the
point, they assured the site managers that should they detect even
a hint of defiance in the future, they would be met with unpleasant
consequences, and they did not mean legal ones. Joe’s virus
completely destroyed foreign-based Web sites. The word got around
quickly: Try to do this again, and your systems would implode, plus
you stood to meet some very nasty people.

Amir was furious at Fadime. She couldn’t
resist showing the video to Tess when they met in Sorrento. She had
alerted Tess’s people, and they had taken preventive measures to
make sure that the dissemination of the video would not occur.

Jake told Tess of what happened. She shrugged
her shoulders. “There is so much of this stuff on the net that the
video would probably be ignored. Nowadays, it seems that couples of
every age feel obliged to post videos of themselves doing the dirty
need. It’s so pervasive that Amir’s video would barely make a
blip.”

Jake disagreed. “Amir could have sent the
video to every important person doing business with your dad. He
might still plan to do it. We have to make sure it doesn’t happen
again.

“How are you going to keep Amir from
trying?”

“I don’t know yet, but I have people working
on it.”

Chapter 78

Tess stopped by her dad’s large apartment
and picked up little Morgan. She insisted on taking him with her to
the farmhouse. With Amir in town, anything could happen. She
strapped the child on the back seat carrier and gave him a big kiss
on his chubby cheek. She and Jake took off in his brand new Land
Rover. The previous vehicle had helped them survive the attack on
the highway, so Jake just replaced it with a more luxurious
model.

A Suburban SUV with four of Jake’s men
followed them. He did not want to take any chances. The men were
charged with their protection.

Carmen and Nicola were still staying at
Jake’s farmhouse in Sleepy Hollow. They appreciated the peace and
quiet and the opportunity to enjoy each other. Tess called and told
her that she and Jake were coming over for the weekend. She also
told her to keep an eye on anything out of the ordinary. It seemed
that Amir had started unleashing mischief, and she did not want to
take any chances.

Carmen, the ever practical one, asked a
logical question. “Tess, do you expect that something will happen
soon?” Should we leave this place and return to New York?”

“I don’t think it would make any difference,
Carmen. Jake feels that if there is to be a showdown, it might as
well on the farm. He has set up resources there.”

“What do you mean by resources? Do you have
any arms in the house?”

“Just go to the basement. Push the green tile
above the dishwasher. That will open a door to the weapons storage
room. Take what you need. Please be careful. We will see you in two
or three hours.”

Carmen and Nicola followed Tess’s advice.
They pushed the tile and a concealed sliding door opened. They
walked into a room that served as an armory and were astonished to
see an assortment of weapons neatly hanging on the wall. There was
enough to start a small war — pistols, high-powered sniper rifles,
rocket-propelled grenades, a selection of long distance scopes and
tons of ammunition. The inventory even included porcupine iron
spikes that could be used to surround the property to thwart anyone
approaching the house uninvited. Topping the charts were small
explosive devices that could be concealed on the perimeter and
detonate like mines if they were stepped on.

Nicola was impressed. “Jake must have built
this arsenal after he and Tess were attacked on the highway.”

“If that still is a concern, why didn’t they
move somewhere else?” Carmen was puzzled.

“Jake told me that he loved this place and he
would not let anyone drive him away from it. In any case, if
someone wanted to come after them, they would find them anywhere
they lived. Jake is not the type to run away from challenges.”

“Nicola, I have a feeling that something is
going to happen soon. We better prepare.”

***

Five of Amir’s mercenaries wore dark
uniforms, making them almost invisible in the dark moonless night.
They met outside the fence around Jake’s farmhouse and barn. They
scoped the area with their binoculars and noticed nothing out of
the ordinary. They saw some movement inside the house and the
shadow of a man behind a curtain reading a book. They hadn’t
expected occupants in the house; they were probably caretakers.
This was a minor annoyance that they would need to tackle
immediately.

One of the men used steel cutters to cut a
hole in the barbed wire fence circling the property. Stealthily,
the group walked through the hole and proceeded toward the house.
They were planning to neutralize the people inside and then wait
for Jake and Tess. Throughout, the men used transmitters in their
helmets to communicate with Amir and Kemal, who were parked in a
small cluster of trees not far from the house. Their SUV was
crammed with communications gear, with several weapon stored in
racks, ready to be used.

The mercenaries stopped one hundred yards
from the house and got ready to rush in and bust the door. The
first order of business was to kill the man that was reading behind
the curtain. One of them took aim and shot at the silhouette. The
man fell. This was the signal to rush in and seize the house. As
they started to run, the men suddenly screamed in pain. They had
stepped on porcupine devices the Nicola had hidden around the
approaches to the house. The barbs had penetrated their boots. That
stopped the men for the moment.

The mercenaries managed to pull the spikes
out of their feet; they were now hurting like hell, limping, bloody
and in a rage. “Whoever did this will pay,” one of them said,
resenting the fact that their intended victims refused to lay back
and be killed. They broke the front door and rushed into the house.
The man in the chair was down on the floor, but it really wasn’t a
man. It was a makeshift dummy positioned at the window behind the
curtain. The leader cursed and rushed upstairs, but nobody was
there.

When the attackers cut the fence, they had
triggered an alarm in the kitchen. Nicola and Carmen had sprinted
outside and rappelled up to the canopy of a giant oak at one end of
the property. They had stashed weapons and ammo in an old and
rickety treehouse that in the past must have been used by the
children of the previous owner.

The men rushed out of the house looking for
the occupants. They heard a crack and one of them fell backward,
hit by a bullet in the chest. Carmen was a crack shot, and she had
installed a scope and silencer on the tip of her sniper rifle.
Nicola was similarly armed. They took a couple more shots, but the
invaders had combat experience and quickly took cover behind the
house. The mercenaries tried to determine where the shots were
coming from, but the silencers on their opponents’ rifles made it
hard to detect the source.

The leader of the group scoped the area once
more with his night vision binoculars. An old barn at the far end
of the property was too far to serve as a useful platform for the
shooters. The large tree a few hundred yards from the house was the
only elevation from which the shots could have originated. The
shooters must be up there. He signaled and his men fanned out and
ran toward the tree, firing their automatic weapons. Carmen and
Nicola saw them coming but did not shoot. Suddenly, an explosion
hurled one of the men up in the air. “Damn, they placed mines on
the ground,” warned the point man. The temporary disorientation was
fatal. Carmen dropped the leader with a shot to the head. Nicola
followed, hitting the next invader in the leg.